Increases in the computational capabilities of mobile devices such as cell phones, and in the bandwidth available to those devices from mobile networks, have lead to increased usage of packet-based media services such as voice calls, video streaming and the like. Such services are generally less tolerant of delays in packet transmission than services such as email. Thus, handling corrupted packets by requesting their re-transmission is sometimes impractical or impossible. In order to improve the reliability of such services, forward error correction (FEC) can therefore be employed. FEC involves including certain redundant data in the transmission to the mobile device, that allows the device to reconstruct at least some of the “regular” data (e.g. call audio, streaming video) in the event of corruption. In 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) networks, examples of FEC mechanisms are found in specifications such as TS 26.946 V 11.1.0 (release 11) and TS 26.947 V1.0.0 (release 11).
Various FEC mechanisms impose varying levels of overhead of transmissions to the mobile devices. Such overhead can, in some cases, negatively impact the quality of the service being delivered to the mobile device.